As a reader, I read phrases like that and smile but as a writer, when I read phrases like that, I get a little jealous that I didn't come up with it. So simple yet scalpel sharp and threatening.  I knew very little about this book when it was sent other than it was poetry and that the author is a stand up guy with a lot of darkness to channel.  The slim but beautiful book arrived and I read it in a single sitting.  To call this work powerful would be a slight understatement.

Christopher Ropes does not just dig deep. He strips his skin to show you the corded muscle beneath, muscle worm strong from decades of holding back or holding in.  He then flays that muscle to show the vessels that carry his blood, sometimes spill it.  We get to glimpse his bones and his lungs...every part of this man is displayed for you on the page.  There are honest writers and then there is this: a level of brutality and eroticism razor-fighting in an arena for the damned and the dreaming.

These a tableaus, rendered in ash and grue. Drying on hides and silk tapestries, adorning abattoirs and palaces alike.  They are songs for the lost, the dead and the dying. The insane and the sick.  This is honesty in broad fat strokes that wriggle like leeches.   This is a parade of open wound in words.  It is so haunting and so riveting, I read it and immediately went back to page one and read it through a second time.  Poetry is hard to review,  there is no easy way to synopsize the content.  I will say that it is a powerful collection. One that will stain you, probably crimson.

A limited edition The Operating Theater is available from Dynatox Ministries.but is close to sold out. There is a revised edition in the works that should be available soon. 

When it comes to promoting your book I have always said that interviews are more important than reviews.  Everyone is shouting into the vast void about their latest 5-star review, and nine times out of ten it isn't a review it's a poorly written 1000 word summary of the book with a rating tacked on to the end of it.  A well-written interview that asks intelligent questions that get to the heart of the interviewee is a far more potent tool for getting an artistic project noticed.  It alls comes down to the promote yourself without actually taking about your project.  

So what is a reviewer to do when they are faced with a book filled with interviews?  

Many people read to escape from the reality of the modern world, a lot of them pick Urban Fantasy as their preferred genre of escape, the appeal and lure of a mythical and mystical world manifesting itself alongside our mundane world is one to understand easily.  Wouldn't it be fabulous if a fantasy land lived just at the corner of our eye, or hiding behind the Wainscot borrowing the things we leave behind, or lurking at the end of the dark alleyway that you will only ever find if it wants you to.  Over the years there have been hundreds of authors dabbling in this idea of the fantastical living side beside or world, Gaiman, Butcher, Miéville and even Rowling have all entertained us with wonderful tales of gods, faeries and goblins mixing with telephone boxes, pubs, and laundromats.  While they are all wildly different in style, most of them had one thing in common, in that they had a real sense of fantasy and wonder, where the denizens of The Land Beyond the West shine like a beacon in the darkness of our world.  

Only when a book that treats these beings in a more grounded manner and incorporates them in a dare I say it, a more mundane fashion, that you realise that just how drab and homogenised, the genre has become. 

Led Zepplin once sang about  "a bustle in your hedgerow." While they proclaimed that any alarm was not necessary, after reading The Hatching  from Ezekiel Boone, any bustles, rustles or hustles emanating from any hedgerow or any other shrubbery based garden feature should be met with not just extreme caution, but with extreme prejudice.  

The Hatching marks the debut of an exciting new talent in horror / sci-fi/thrillers, a pre-apocalyptic novel told from various viewpoints, with a sense of pace that and narrative drive that has to be read to be believed, and a fantastic and chilling adversary, THE HATCHING  is an assured debut novel.  

 
Mr. Bark has been on an absolute tear lately, with a novel (The Final Cut) and novella (Run To Ground) release with Crystal Lake publishing, and now a novella (Bed of Crimson Joy) from KnightWatch Press.
 
Bed of Crimson Joy is, in many ways, vintage Bark. We’ve got inexplicable supernatural occurrences, brilliantly realised relationships, and explicit sexual content. What strongly differentiates this story from the others, for me, is the tone - whereas The Final Cut was a rollercoaster of genre and mood, and Run To Ground a brilliant comedy-horror mashup underpinned by a Barkeresque mythology, Bed Of Crimson is an altogether more melancholy affair.
 
The crux of this is the central relationship between Rose and Stanley, a late middle-aged couple rubbing along together. It’s this portrait that has haunted me the most since finishing the story - the quiet sadness of Rose, her unfulfilled life limping along with vague companionship in place of love. Bark draws the lines of the relationship cleanly and without sentimentality, and it’s all the more affecting for it. I was genuinely moved by Rose’s situation, all the more awful because of her own resignation and acceptance.
 
 
Horror fans will not be disappointed - once the story gets rolling in earnest, things take a very creepy turn, and the denouement is as bleak and horrifying as you could wish for. There’s a strong atmosphere throughout of inevitable doom, of macabre forces at work, pressing down on our unfortunate protagonists. Bark’s care and skill at characterisation means that I found myself caring for Rose, even as I feared for her.
 
Jasper Bark remains almost a paradoxical writer - at once shamelessly focussed on the prerenaily juvenile fasciations of sex and extreme horror, yet also writing with a rare intelligence, both emotional and intellectual, with a true storyteller’s ability to present real people, unflinchingly and without either sentimentality or judgement. But of course that’s a false dichotomy - sex and death basically never stop being interesting, do they? I guess what I really mean is that Bark is the full package - a man whose talent defies the literary/splatterpunk divide, and whose work is undoubtedly both.
 
Bed of Crimson Joy is both rollicking sex-and-guts supernatural horror and mature, even poignant reflection on mortality and the passing of time. Jasper Bark may be capable of writing a bad tale. But on current evidence, he hasn’t yet. Recommended.